Children's Rights in 20 languages

Working with CEATL (the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations) and FIT (the International Federation of Translators), this new BCBF initiative is all about the rights of young citizens on planet Earth.
The BCBF has put together a video programme of literary translators reading out the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child. This venture follows on from a partnership at BCBF 2024 with the United Nations to bring together publishers, authors, and illustrators from around the globe for a collective and multilingual reading of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.
Twenty-nine translators from twenty countries took part in the initiative, hosted on the BCBF website. Each translator reads out selected articles from the Convention in their own languages.
Francesca Novajra, President of CEATL, presented the Convention before the rollcall of translators and their enthusiastic video readings.
The initiative is part of a partnership between BCBF and CEATL that, since 2022, has promoted best practice in literary translation and copyright.

Translators in support of young people's rights

“We’ll be playing here every day, until the end of the world” wrote Marcel Broodthaers in a letter about his Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, a fictional museum he put together between 1968 and 1972. Once upon a time you could not touch anything in museums and children were often not admitted as we can read on Broodthaers’ plaque Museum. Children not admitted. The children’s museums and children’s science museums born in the USA in the twentieth century, changed that rule and urged children to touch things, to experiment. The “Hands On!” revolution started and today there is an international network of children’s museums of the same name that strives to make museums and science centres relevant places for children. 

In Italy, from the 1950s to the 1980s, Loris Malaguzzi created and developed a new educational philosophy: the Reggio Emilia Approach® was based on the image of a child who is a subject with rights and a great potential to flourish, who learns through the hundred languages belonging to all human beings, and grows through relations with others.

In 1964, the first international children’s bookfair was held in Bologna and a progressive education movement gained momentum thanks to the visionary minds of Gianni Rodari, Mario Lodi, Leo Lionni and Bruno Munari, among others. It was a revolution in the way of considering children and childhood whose principles still holds true today.

The first United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child was approved in 1959 and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, signed in 1989.[1] As it is explained on the UNICEF website: “Contained in this treaty is a profound idea: that children are not just objects who belong to their parents and for whom decisions are made, or adults in training. Rather, they are human beings and individuals with their own rights. The Convention says childhood is separate from adulthood, and lasts until 18; it is a special, protected time, in which children must be allowed to grow, learn, play, develop and flourish with dignity.”

The Convention is one of those texts we should read aloud over and over, to remind us what it means to be a child and what we, as adults, should always do: respect children and childhood. Now more than ever, with conflicts and migration phenomena the world over, children are victims of wars, natural disasters, malnutrition and diseases, terrible forms of violence, exploitation and abuse, or do not have access to quality education. The Convention explains who children are, their rights, and governments’ responsibilities. All the rights are connected to one another, they are all equally important and they cannot be taken away from children. 

When BCBF invited CEATL members – 36 associations of literary translators from 27 countries, in turn extending the call to FIT – to read the articles of the Convention aloud in their different languages, the translators’ reply to the call was a passionate one. They made videos from their home offices or out of doors, in a Berlin playground, or with Lego and toys in a toy library in the Netherlands, or reading the Convention to their own child in Zagreb.

This chorus of translators’ voices is powerful. Listen to them. Listen to the music of their languages. Every language has its own sound, its own rhythm, its own syntax, its own alphabet, its own symbols. There are languages we are more familiar with and others we might have never heard. Every language is a universe of literatures and cultures.

Look at the translators’ faces: literary translators are people in flesh and bones who work to let readers discover other literatures and universes. We have to put ourselves in the other’s shoes every day to rewrite words and retell stories in another language. In kid lit, in particular, to convey puns, music, rhymes and nonsense, in a harmonic, illustrations-accompanied ballet. As Daniel Hahn writes, “People think about translating as a process of de-coding, which it is; but it’s also about re-encoding. Not just deciphering a meaning, but reconstructing a new expression for it.”

Article 17 of the Convention states the importance of books for children. Children’s books are, indeed, essential. As the Resolution about the Future of the European Book Sector  (2023) tells us: “Books are invaluable as they are the foundation for learning and knowledge. When children learn to read, they don’t simply decipher words, their minds are opened up to a world of limitless ideas. They develop the ability to think critically, enabling them to become active, informed citizens who can participate fully in the democratic process. Books are also great source of entertainment and let us travel without moving our feet. They stimulate our imagination and creativity and enable us to better understand the world we live in.”  This is why it is so important to publish books from different cultures, to translate from different languages. Kids have a right to leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities and, as Astrid Lindgren once said, “good literature gives the child a place in the world and the world a place in the child”.

Let’s read books to children, let’s read together with them, even if they have already learnt to read, let’s share tales and stories with them, let’s share questions with them and have fun with them, it will do good for them and for us.

Francesca Novajra is a literary translator working into Italian from English, French and Portuguese. She is currently president of CEATL in which she represents AITI. She was born in the Swinging Sixties and grew up reading Rodari’s books. After a degree in Translation in Geneva and a degree in Interpreting in Trieste, she worked for a printing house, as an editorial assistant for a kid lit publisher and for a children’s museum; she also held workshops for children about translation. In 2017 was awarded the FIT Astrid Lindgren Prize. When she hears people saying that translating for children is easy, she smiles.